Dana Gioia

Richard
Wilbur:A
Critical Survey of His Career

Richard
Purdy Wilbur was born on March 1, 1921 in New York City. In a nation
famously composed of immigrants, Wilbur had unusually deep native
rootshe was an eleventh generation American descended from
the original settlers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. His family,
however, was not especially affluent, and his parents reflected
an unusual mixture of artistic and middle-class values. His Nebraska-born
father, Lawrence Wilbur, had run away to New York City at sixteen
to study art. He became a successful commercial artist and later
a portrait painter. His mother, Helen Purdy Wilbur, came from a
family of newspaper journalists. Not surprisingly, the future poets
earliest ambitions combined his parents two backgrounds; the
young Wilbur initially hoped to be a newspaper cartoonist.

Wilbur
had an odd but idyllic childhood. In 1923 his family moved to North
Caldwell, New Jersey where they rented a pre-Revolutionary stone
house on a four-hundred acre estate owned by a charming but eccentric
English millionaire. Few other children lived nearby, so the poet
and his younger brother Lawrence amused themselves by wandering
the farm and countryside. This pleasant rural boyhood surely helped
form the imagination that later created such memorable nature poems
as "Hamlen Brook" and "The Beautiful Changes."

The
Amherst Radical

In
1938 Wilbur entered the then all-male Amherst College where he majored
in English. The young poet was a self-styled radical. Although he
once dutifully attended a Marx study group (where he fell asleep),
his real political passions were for the progressive New Deal programs
fostered by President Franklin Roosevelt. During two summers he
hitchhiked and rode the rails across Depression-era Americaonce
alone and once with two college friendsan adventure he recounts
wryly in the poem, "Piccola Commedia." Today, no one looking
at the exceptionally well-groomed and dignified adult poet would
guess that he was the only U. S. Poet Laureate to have been a hobo.

At
Amherst Wilbur became chairman of the student newspaper to which
he contributed both drawings and articles. He also fell in love
with Charlotte Ward, a student at nearby Smith College, an all-womans
college then considered one of Amhersts "sister schools."
The poet often walked the nine miles separating the two schools
to visit "Charlee." They married in June 1942 following
the poets graduation.

War
Years

The
young couple, however, were wed in the shadow of World War II, which
the U.S. had entered after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941. Several of Wilburs Amherst classmates, who
had enlisted before graduation, had already been killed in action.
Wilbur hoped to become a cryptographera specialist in deciphering
enemy codesand he even spent part of his honeymoon practicing
Morse code. Joining the U. S. Army, he briefly studied at a secret
military installation in Virginia learning to transcribe and translate
radio codes. Midway through this training, however, Wilbur was abruptly
transferred to Infantry. He had been classified "Suspected
of Disloyalty" after a security check discovered his leftist
views and radical friends.

In
his new unit, Wilbur joined the Allied Forces that invaded Italy
and France to fight the German army. His division saw combat for
three years from the dangerous amphibious landing on the beaches
of Salerno and Anzio and the brutal assault on Monte Cassino to
the final collapse of the fortified Siegfried Line guarding Germanys
border. Having seen many of his fellow soldiers killed in combat,
Wilbur left the Army in 1945 with the rank of staff sergeant.

Coming
to Harvard

After
the end of World War II, Wilbur joined the millions of U. S. veterans
who furthered their education on the G. I. Bill. Now with a small
daughter (the first of four childrenall the rest boys), he
entered Harvard Graduate School to study English. After receiving
his Masters Degree in 1947, he spent three years as a Junior
Fellow, the universitys highest academic honor for a young
scholar, and then joined the Harvard faculty in 1950. In Cambridge
Wilbur met many writers who would influence his intellectual development.
He also served as a teaching assistant for two of Harvards
most eminent literary scholarsF. O. Matthiessen, the distinguished
intellectual historian of American Renaissance and editor
of The Oxford Book of American Verse, and I. A. Richards,
the influential literary linguist and author of Practical Criticism.

Wilburs
most important literary friendship at Harvard, however, was with
Robert Frost. Although there was nearly a half century difference
in their ages, the two poets became fast friends. The often cantankerous
Frost recognized the admiring younger poets talent, but what
initially caught his attention was Charlee Ward Wilburs maiden
name. Her grandfather had in 1894 been the first editor to publish
Frosts poems. This early friendship had a lifelong impact
on Wilbur. Frosts poetic stylewith its balance of formal
music and conversational tone, its engaging surface sense and disturbing
depthsdeeply influenced Wilburs notion of lyric poetry.

Soon
Wilburs promising scholarly career took an unexpected turn.
Although he had written poems since childhood, he had never thought
of himself primarily as a poet. During the war he began writing
regularly and sent the poems to his wife. She showed one poem to
a friend who was an editor at the Saturday Evening Post,
one of the nations biggest magazines, which published it.
Wilbur published no other verse during the war (only a column for
his Army Divisions newspaper). At Harvard, he continued writing
and published a few poems in small magazines. One day he gave a
group of his poems to an Amherst friend who worked as an editor.
A few hours later the man returned, and according to Wilbur, "wrapped
his arms around me, kissed me on both cheeks, and declared me a
poet." (Conversations with Richard Wilbur, 20) The friend
quickly convinced the New York firm of Reynal and Hitchcock to publish
the manuscript. Few poets have had an easier debut.

Early
Critical Success

In
September, 1947 Wilburs first book, The Beautiful Changes
and Other Poems appeared, The poet was twenty-six years old,
a remarkably early age for so definitive a debut. The Beautiful
Changes received excellent reviews with critics praising Wilbur
as an especially gifted member of "the war generation"
of writers. By the time his second book Ceremony and Other Poems arrived in 1950 Wilbur had become the poet of his generation.
Babette Deutsch exclaimed in the New York Times Book Review,
"Here is poetry to be read with the eye, the ear, the heart
and the mind." (Richard Wilburs Creation, 37)
Even the notoriously tough Joseph Bennett declared in The Hudson
Review "Wilburs is the strongest poetic talent I
can see in America below the generation now in their fifties."
(Richard Wilburs Creation, 41) Heady praise for a poet
not yet thirty.

Since
the publication of Ceremony, Wilburs artistic stature
has never been seriously challenged. His work not only demonstrated
his unsurpassed individual gifts, but it also exemplified a new
formal style emerging among the mid-century generation of poets.
Sometimes called the "New Critical" style, this approach
usually employed rhyme and meter, elaborate wordplay (especially
puns and paradoxes), and intricate argument to create subtle and
intelligentbut rarely highly emotionalpoems. The poems
were complex but comprehensibleand they often seemed to cry
out for critical analysis, especially the line-by-line examination
called "close reading" practiced by the New Critics.

One
sees the features of the "New Critical" style in the opening
stanza of "Ceremony," which describes a painting of a
woman in a forest by the French Impressionist Jean-Frédéric
Bazille. The dry wit and quiet control of the first five lines hardly
prepare one for the magic of the stanzas final line:

A
striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille
Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs
Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.
But ceremony never did conceal,
Save to the silly eye, which all allows,
How much we are the woods we wander in.

(New
and Collected Poems, 334)

Is
it any wonder that critic Clive James has praised Wilburs
genius for the "killer-diller line"? (Richard Wilburs
Creation, 111).

If Ceremony cemented Wilburs reputation, it also began
to raise what would become the central critical issue surrounding
his work. There was no question that his poetry was immensely accomplishedmusically
phrased, intelligently conceived, and imagistically memorable. Wilbur
seemed incapable of writing a bad poem. The real question was whether
he was sufficiently ambitious. Did Wilbur achieve perfection on
a small scale at the expense of larger accomplishment? Was he unwilling
to risk failure by tackling big themes and extended forms? Poet-critic
Randall Jarrell most succinctly expressed this creative quandary
in an otherwise positive review of Ceremony. "Mr. Wilbur
never goes too far, but he never goes far enough." (Richard
Wilburs Creation 48-49) This critical reservation would
follow Wilbur across his entire career.

Wilburs
next volume, Things of This World (1956), however, momentarily
silenced his critics and unquestionably dazzled his admirers. The
collection won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
His academic career was also happily settled. In 1957 Wilbur accepted
a professorship at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut
where he taught for the next twenty years.

A
Poet in the Theater

While
Wilbur wrote the poems that eventually made up Things of This
World, he began to explore a new form of artistic expressionverse
drama. In 1952 Wilbur had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which provided
funds for a year free from teaching to write full-time. Verse drama
had experienced a huge revival in the years after World War II with
successful productions in London and New York of poetic plays by
T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. A new drama company, the Poets
Theatre, had just started in Cambridge, Massachusetts dedicated
to producing new verse plays or foreign classics in contemporary
translations. Wilbur spent his fellowship year in New Mexico trying
to write poetic plays. "They didnt come off," he
later admitted. "They were very bad, extremely wooden."
(Conversation, 12). To learn the craft of verse drama, Wilbur
began translating The Misanthrope, a classic comedy by Molière,
the great seventeenth century French comic dramatist.

Wilburs
fateful decision to create a rhymed English version of Molières The Misanthrope began one of the greatest literary translation
projects in American literature. Over the next forty years he would
produce lively, sophisticated and eminently stageworthy versions
of all of Molières major comediesThe Misanthrope (1955), Tartuffe (1963), The School for Wives (1971), The Learned Ladies (1978), The School for Husbands (1992), Sganarelle or The Imaginary Cuckold (1993), and Amphitryon (1995) as well as two neo-classical verse tragedies by RacineAndromache (1982) and Phaedre (1986). From the moment his first Molière
translation was stagedat the Poets Theatre on October
31, 1955his versions have delighted and impressed audiences.
Widely produced from Broadway to college campuses, Wilburs
versions not only helped create a Molière revival across
North America, but the royalties they generated eventually enabled
the poet to teach only half time.

The
success of The Misanthrope also led Wilbur into another theatrical
venture inspired by a different French literary classic. Composer
Leonard Bernstein and playwright Lillian Hellman approached the
poet to write song lyrics for their musical comedy Candide (based on Voltaires celebrated novel). Bernstein and Hellman
had already been struggling with the project for five years when
Wilbur joined the creative team. Candide became a notoriously
difficult enterprise. Hellman proved temperamental, and Bernstein
stubborn. Although the musical was positively reviewed with special
praise for Wilburs sparkling lyrics, the lavish production
did poorly when it premiered on Broadway in December 1956. (Ironically,
a modest production of The Misanthrope, which opened in New
York at the same time, was both a commercial and critical success.)
Over the next thirty years, however, Bernstein and others repeatedly
revised the musical and eventually replaced most of Hellmanns
dialogue. Very gradually Candide has emerged as a classic
of American musical theater, and the Wilbur/Bernstein song, "Glitter
and Be Gay," now occupies a special place in the repertory
of American sopranos.

A
Master of Verse Translation

Wilbur
has not confined his interest in poetic translation to the theater.
Every volume of his poems since Ceremony has contained verse
translations. Sometimes accounting for a quarter of the books
contents, these masterful English versions are usually drawn from
French and Italian (two languages Wilbur knows well), but his translations
also include poems from Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian,
Latin, Hungarian, and Anglo-Saxon. A master technician, Wilbur almost
always duplicates the originals form in English, even when
translating intricately rhymed sonnets, rondeaus, and ballades.
Yet he never loses the literal sense or emotional force of the original.

His
translation of early modernist Guillaume Apollinaires unpunctuated
but complexly musical "Pont Mirabeau," for instance, reads
as if it had originally been written in English. It begins:

Under
the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine

Must
I recall

Our
loves recall how then

After
each sorrow joy came back again

Let
night come on bells end the day

The
days go by me still I stay

(New
and Collected Poems, 28)

It
would be hard to overpraise Wilburs special genius for translation.
He has no equal among his contemporaries and stands with Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Ezra Pound, and Robert Fitzgerald as one of the four
greatest translators in the history of American poetry. Those critics
who fault Wilbur for lacking poetic ambition ignore this essential
and impressive part of his work.

A
Religious Poet

It
has been Wilburs ironic achievement to excel at precisely
those literary forms that many contemporary critics undervaluemetrical
poetry, verse translation, comic verse, song lyrics, and perhaps
foremost among these unfashionable but extraordinary accomplishments,
religious poetry. A practicing Episcopalian, Wilbur is Americas
preeminent living Christian poet. No other author in this neglected
field has written so much over so many years with such consistent
distinction.

At
least a third of Wilburs poemslight verse and translations
asidecontain some conspicuous Christian element. Yet the nature
of his accomplishments is both subtle and complex. Although Christianity
provides the central vision of his work, he has written little devotional
verseovertly pious poetry, that is, that tries to replicate
the act of worship. Instead, Wilbur characteristically uses the
images, ideas, and ceremonies of the Christian faith to provide
perspective on the secular world. Sometimes the literal subject
of the poem is religious as in "Matthew VIII, 28ff." or
"A Christmas Hymn." More often Wilbur subtly weaves his
religious vision into a poems language and imagery as in this
stanza from "October Maples, Portland," which describes
the autumn foliage of New England as symbols of divine redemption
in a fallen world:

A
showered fire we thought forever lost
Redeems the air. Where friends in passing meet,
They parley in the tongues of Pentecost.
Gold ranks of temples flank the dazzled street.

Although
this stanza can be read as a literal description of the October
foliage in Connecticut, the natural world also becomes a sacramental
means of revealing the divine order. Note how the descriptive image
of "showered fire" and word choice of redeems simultaneously
portray bright red maple leaves and suggest the Pentecostal flame
the Holy Spirit placed on the heads of Christs Apostles. Indeed,
as the townspeople converse on the tree-lined street where the trees
form a metaphoric "temple," they both figuratively and
symbolically "Parley in the tongues of Pentecost."

This
stanza also demonstrates how Wilbur uses wordplay for serious ends.
Few poets pun more frequently, but he rarely does so for purely
comic effect. His creative obsession is to have important words
serve double duty in a poem. Wilbur's best poemslike those
of his mentor, Frostoften present a double structure. There
is a surface plot or situation that unfolds in literal terms. Meanwhile
underneath that accessible surface level is a subtext, an unstated
but implied second meaning. "October Maples, Portland"
literally presents a New England seasonal scene, but the subtext
suggests a religious vision of life, death, and eternity. What connects
these two levels of meaning are Wilburs masterful puns and
wordplay.

A
Sustained Career

Wilburs
late career has been one of quiet but steady achievement. Wilbur
retired from teaching in 1986, and in 1987 he succeeded Robert Penn
Warren to become the second Poet Laureate of the United States.
He now divides his time between two homesone in Cummington,
Massachusetts and the other in Key West, Florida. While many poets
(like William Wordsworth) lose artistic vitality in middle age or
(like Matthew Arnold) stop writing verse altogether, Wilbur is the
rare poet who has maintained an unbroken high standard. His style
and sensibility have not changed greatly after The Beautiful
Changesexcept for a slight darkening of tone in his poems
of old agebut every volume has contained superb new work.
The special consistency of his achievement was recognized when his New and Collected Poems (1989) won the Pulitzer Prize, making
him the only living American poet to have won the award twice. His
literary stature has even grown in recent years as a new generation
of young poets interested in rhyme and meter have looked to him
as mentor and model.

Selected
Bibliography:
Works by Richard Wilbur

Poetry

The
Beautiful Changes and Other Poems. New York: Reynal, 1947.

Ceremony
and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.

Things
of This World. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.

Advice
to a Prophet and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961.

The
Poems of Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963.

Walking
to Sleep: New Poems and Translations. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1969.